Making Content × What is our Process? Youtube, Blog Posts, Courses, Conference Talks, and Podcasts

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Boss.

Welcome to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats rid. Out there today, we've got one for you on creating content. What is your process? This is a question that Scott and I get all the time is, like, how do you rid. Figure out what to do content on and how do you tackle sort of, like, the idea of, like, let's take a podcast, for example, taking a podcast on making content. How do you even tackle laying that out and and coming up with ideas and whatnot? So we're going to tell you our process for I'm making YouTube videos, writing blog posts, creating courses, conference talks, podcasts, anywhere where you have to create content for a specific topic. We are Sponsored by 3 awesome companies today.

Linode, Cloud Hosting, Sanity, Structured Content, CMS rid. And LogRocket JavaScript session replay. We'll talk about all of them partway through the episode.

My name is Wes Boss. I'm a developer from Canada. With me as always is mister Scott Talinski. How are you doing today, Scott? Oh, I'm good, man. Just

just cruising.

Yeah. I I don't really have too much to report.

Rid Just just living life, getting the kids out of the house, getting the day care, you know, those kinds of things, the the daily daily flow. Every everyone in our house got sick except for me for some reason. So,

just been feeling good. Feeling bad, though. I'm I'm the only one who's not sick and having to yeah. Just It's the best one, like, 1 person's not sick because then you can at least hold it down for the rest of the family. You know? Oh, yeah. For real. I

Everybody was just hanging out on the couch yesterday, and I was trying to do as much as possible to clean clean the house and all those things.

That's actually, like, something that, I don't know, you you do think about before you come become a parent. But, like, when your kids are into the 2 2 age age 2 and maybe higher. Right? Like, our kids age. Like, man, that house the house does not get clean. It is impossible.

It is so difficult to even just, like, put away things and, you know, scrub everything, and it's just

yeah. Kids kids be messy. That's for sure. Yeah. Wait. I turned rid. Around the other day, and my kid had brought chalk from outside and had chalked up all of our dining room chairs. Like, what are you doing? That's something that happens. Yep.

My daughter left a, a a Pedialyte push pop on the carpet, and now our our wool carpet is stained with rid. Red push pop, it's just, like, nonstop. Every there's nonstop disasters. Nonstop.

All right. Let's get on into it. So I thought we would sort of go through the different types of content that I just rattled off earlier and say, like, how do we come up with ideas? How do you lay out the content? How do you create the content? And then I don't think we'll necessarily cover like how do you actually rid. Create the stuff ourselves, but just the sort of the planning steps and the ideation. How does that sound, Scott? It sounds fantastic.

Rid

Incredible. Incredible. Let's get into the first one because I'm I think a lot of people are curious. So specifically you, Scott, you crank out tons of YouTube videos. You You've been cranking out YouTube videos for, what, like, 10 years now? Like, what is your process? How do you Yeah. How do you keep like, with me, I always get, like, I I get really excited and make a whole bunch of videos, and then I don't touch it for 6 months. And then I do one quick video, and I'm I'm like, oh, I should do more. This is fun. And then I don't do it again. Right? And, rid. Like, I don't have a process for that, and that's why I don't have a,

a very consistent YouTube schedule. But you do. So what is it? Yeah. I do. I I do have a very rid. System schedule. And if you don't know my work, I've been doing YouTube since 2012, March of 2012. So literally 10 years here. Yeah. And so I I took a little break in there, but for a long time, what I was doing would be I would work on something all day at work, like building WordPress sites. And then I would come home While my wife was studying, and I would just record a video explaining what I did at work.

Like, not not like, here's why they didn't work today, but more like, Here's how to do this in Drupal. It I e. It was just something I had done that day, so it was really fresh in my mind. So back in that time, it was really easy for me to Take what I was doing in my day to day and not even necessarily plan that tightly around it and just record.

Then I I took a a large break from YouTube rid To, work on level of tutorials as a business.

And now that that's in, like, a a more secure place where I'm feeling confident we have guest creators, My YouTube process has evolved a ton. So now what we have on YouTube is 3 weekly shows. And so for Coming up with ideas for 3 weekly shows feels like that would be a lot. Like, that feels like a lot of content. Right? But in reality, what I have here is I have a a giant to do list and several segmented to do lists, one for each show.

And any single time I have an idea, Good, bad, anything, I just drop it in there.

I just always am kind of just I see somebody tweet something out of it's like a question or maybe Something that they're concerned with or confused about. I just I just add it to the list. Right? With maybe not necessarily any intention of ever making it, with the just the possibility that it's captured and therefore exists. Right? So when you're creating this kind of thing for 3 weekly series and having to come up with ideas. It's kind of essential that you always have ideas ready.

Rid.

This is really it's just always having my my ears wide open to the world to catalog any individual idea.

And I have, Wes, I have, like, 15, 16 planned YouTube tutorial series or shows or whatever. I have all of these, Like, long running things planned, I just don't have the bandwidth to make this stuff. So, yeah, really, the the biggest rid. For me has always been to generate more ideas than than I'm actually going to be able to do. That way, when the time comes to record, I have things. And maybe it's the thing I was expecting to record. Maybe it wasn't.

Maybe it's just whatever I'm feeling that day because Yeah. As long as you have those ideas At the home, ready to go, you're never going to be searching for something.

Another thing that's, like, really helped me create YouTube content specifically is to batch it all together.

Now if you're new to recording or talking on a microphone or anything like that, it Can be very kind of socially exhausting even though you're not being social. You're still kind of being social just to no one in particular. Right? Yeah. So that's kind of like an endurance skill you need to build up in terms of how much you're writing a day or how much you're able to speak on a microphone a day. But if I record 5 or 6 videos in one day, which seems like a lot. But if you have the ideas ready and there's stuff that you know about already, 5 or 6 videos in one day, I can then schedule those videos to then release at any given time.

And if I have if I have, 3 weekly shows, 6 videos in one day means that I'm covered now for 2 weeks from recordings in one day.

I could do another 6 another day and then rid be covered for an entire month. And so having that that sort of implicit like, rid. This needs to happen here. This needs to happen here. I need to have all of my content ready to go or all of the ideas ready to go so I can batch record, rid. Schedule it out and then have them come out on their own accord. Awesome.

That that's that's really helpful.

I'm not gonna talk on YouTube videos because rid with mine. My YouTube video is generally just like here's something that I learned or here's something that I made or here's a problem I ran into rid. And here's how I solved it, which is, yeah, actually not a bad approach, to to doing YouTube videos as well because it's like, alright. This is kind of interesting. You generally, rid. I reach for YouTube videos when it's the best medium for me to explain something rather than

create content that is specifically for that medium. Yeah. And it's funny that, you know, one thing that we're gonna be doing a whole episode on, but, like, a lot of people, they'll start YouTube as a Wanna be content creator, and they'd say, I'm gonna start doing some YouTube videos. They'll do kind of sporadic videos here or there. They'll kind of just, like, pick it up, make something, Like, kind of like what you're doing, West, but you already have an audience. You already have your courses. You already have your blog. You have those things. But For many people who don't have that position that you have, they're not gonna get any traction just by kind of willy nilly making YouTube videos.

So if you're the type of person who really wants to gain subscriber numbers, gain gain traction in that regard, One thing that you'll want to do is explicitly schedule your content to always be released on a certain time. So, like, I'm going to have 1 video every single Monday come out rather than I'm gonna release when I feel like it. What that does is it gives your audience an idea of when you release, How often you release, what they can expect from subscribing to your channel, because there's really nothing worse than, like, you you You watch a really good video from somebody. They did it consistently or non consistently for, like, 4 weeks, but because it hasn't been built in as, like, a habit of theirs, Then they just stop. And you're like, well, I'd really wish you kept going with this or done it more consistently or or done it on those those intervals that, really helps build your audience. So, pro tip right there is to keep your content always releasing at the same time.

And we'll talk about that for podcast too because we we do that with Syntax. Right? Monday and Wednesday shows. It's an important thing to do.

Yeah. Exactly.

Ready. Alright. Let's move on to the next one, which is conference talks. This is a bit of a different medium, but, again, you're still trying to entertain people and get them the information that they want.

Generally with my conference talks, I like to, sort of group together a whole lot of different things that are rid. Loosely associated with JavaScript or CSS or, building something that's headless or e commerce or something like that. And then you take that general topic.

And then my approach to it is I like to include, I don't know. 5, 6, 7, 8 different things that are loosely associated with them. And I find that that works really well because sometimes you get 20 minutes into your conference talk and you're just like, this is not that interesting to me. I really don't care about this. And You've got 40 more minutes left in it, and you're like, well, I guess I'll just, like, do my go on Slack and talk to my team.

And that's not every conference talk out there, and that's not any slant against the actual conference speaker. It's just that Some stuff is not interesting to people. So what I found that works well for me is if you include lots of things, you might not necessarily care about the web payments API, But you do care about these new proposals to JavaScript, then at least you come out of it going, okay, that's neat. I learned 3 or 4 things from rid. That was that was worth my time. So once I have those main ideas, 6 or 7 different things to go, I like to break each of those down and to explain, like, what it is and where we're at with it right now.

Explain why you might want it because that's rid. You explain something to someone and immediately going through their head is, that's dumb. And why would I need that? So you have to immediate ready. Okay. You might need this in this situation or, have you ever run into this situation in coding and, like, oh, yeah, everybody has. That's the worst. Well, this is going to make that a lot easier. Oh, man. That's awesome.

And then I like to end it off with a fun example of like, here it actually is.

Open up your actual code. Open up the browser. You know, like, that's again, that's just my style for for that type of thing. So I think when some some of the keywords that you use, Like, frequently,

we're just about making it fun. And yeah. You know what? I mean, it's it's not necessarily an easy thing to do all the time, but when you have a conference talk, tech Conferences or conferences in general, they can get really just, you know, like you said, just just maybe uneventful or rid Or Stuffy. Stuffy or boring or whatever.

And having those bits of fun in your talk, Even if it's something stupid. Like, I I personally really enjoy using animated GIFs and talks even if it is Something that everyone did at a period of time. I still like it because it's it adds some more fun into a place that, Like, might not necessarily be fun.

And just like you don't have to make it goofy. You don't have to make it weird or whatever. But I I do think that That adding fun to your planning phase of this or having, pause for pause for laughs, you know, those types of situations where, rid. You can you can make people feel a little bit more engaged. I think that will even if even if, like, even if your tech tech talk isn't going to be necessarily the most, You know, groundbreaking thing, you do want it to be explicitly entertaining. That is something that you want out of your your danger. You're giving a presentation to entertain people and to teach people. So it's something that you should be considerate of when you're planning, I think. Yeah. Absolutely. And rid. Also, like, one other little tip

I have there is, like Scott says, throw animated GIF on it.

Don't make your audience rid. Stare at a wall of text. Yeah.

So unless you're explicitly, I don't know, having a like, I know designers love to have quotes and stuff like that in their in their talks. Like, that makes that makes a little bit of sense. But, for me, I like to have lots of screenshots of code or things of websites, and then you can rattle off on that. And there's lots of software out there that allow you to have your own Separate speaker notes, if you're not comfortable just rattling off on something. But generally, I I don't do that at all just because I just

I've got a a big mouth, and I can I can talk forever? Yeah. I know. I I'm I'm the same way. And it's actually funny. I I've been definitely getting more into, rid. Visual things in my my talks, but I totally agree that, like, even bullet big bullet point, pointed list, or or just text in general. Yeah. You're basically just reading off the thing that you're seeing on the slides is that doesn't really make it engaging.

So, yeah, I do quite a bit of bullet points, But that's that's only to help the audience understand where you're at in the thought process. Totally. Like, here's 5 things coming to JavaScript

and, and they okay. They can kind of get an idea of where you're at, but don't put all the information on the the text slide because. Yeah, Yeah. You don't need to put everything that you're going to say a book. On the slide. You're going to say it. But, yeah, having having the bullet point blow, that's fine too. You know what I've been doing lately, Wes, is, rid. The last 2 conferences conference talks that I've given, I've used Notion as my slides, and I just Make the text all big. I I zoom up Notion. And then Yeah. When I want a code demo, which I I frequently do in my talks, I drop in an embedded Stackblitz re repo.

So that way, it's like Notion, and you're just scrolling down. But then you have, like, this embedded code window. That way, you don't have to tab off into a browser or deal with any of that stuff, and you can keep it all, like, kind of rid right in front of you, and it makes the code easy to share. So shout out to Stacklets for making embeds like that super super nice and easy.

Rid. We we should, shout out that we Scott and I are finally gonna be back at a conference, Reactathon.

So if you want to come hang out with Scott and I, go to reactathon.com.

It is May 2 through 5, And we're going to be doing a live version of syntax so you can hit that up.

Look at the go to the reactathon.com website. And they did these, like, Hand drawn portraits of us? Did they? The one of me is, like,

I look gorgeous. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. I did see that. Yeah. I think yeah. I definitely, yeah. You and me, we both got got some, like, rid. Yeah. Interesting eye stuff going on. Yeah.

Kent Kent see Dodds looks like he's 11 on this photo. Yeah.

These are great.

Rid. Oh, man. That's funny. Cool. So, yeah, check that on out. I'm excited to actually get back to To doing conferences and whatnot. It's been been way too long.

Yeah. I'm really excited as well, especially, I'm gonna we're gonna get to do some, like, fun you know, People might not know because we've only done 2 live syntax on stage, but we do a lot of, like, fun stuff. And to me, that's the thing I'm most excited about is coming up with some fun stuff to do on stage. Rid. I was trying to think about some games we could play with. So my brain's been going in that direction. Oh, right on. Pretty excited. Yeah. Sick. Rid. Let's talk about one of our sponsors, which is

Linode.linode.comforward/ syntax is a URL. Linode is rid. Cloud computing that developers trust. They have Linux cloud solutions and services for you as a developer. You wanna host your web rid. Say you want someone to throw your images. You want to be able to scale up with Kubernetes.

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One quick thing before we move on from even conference talks, this is just like a very small point I I I had written here, but I forgot when we were talking about it. You know, a lot of people get hung up on the tech for making slides. Like, I've used Yeah. Some slide tech before, like MDX Deck, I've used I've used, Spectacle from Formidable, and I've used PowerPoint, and I've used everything under the sun. And there's a reason why I'm doing just Notion docs right now that I can scroll down is because all of that stuff can take so much time and energy. So, rid. If you have limited time and energy to put together your your conference talk, like, if it's a rush job, you gotta hurry up.

Spend no time at all making the slides. This like, making the slides, yes. You wanna make them fun and creative when you can. But if you if you can't, rid. Focus on, like, just the content first and foremost rather than the tech behind the slide. The slides looking good is way better or way more important rid. Then the slides being coded in the latest version of React or whatever you're trying to do. So true. It's so frustrating trying to pick the tack and

learn. You're learning an entire new framework just to build the slides. Like years years ago, probably like 8 years ago, I built rid. Like, I built it on, like, that base HTML 5 slide deck, and I haven't deviated from it. I've just added a whole bunch of basically I always like pick a font, rid. I pick a color scheme and then you set those things and they will always look unique, but they're all kind of the same idea where I've got a whole bunch of like ready. Handy classes that center themselves and autoplay videos when you go to it. But it's very, very simple at the end of the day, and it just gets out of your way. You don't need that much for a fancy like thinking about, like, animations and whatnot.

Yeah, totally. It's just about the content. It's about the content. Yeah, totally.

Rid. Let's get into course layouts. This is probably the biggest one on here. People ask Scott and I about is like, rid. I think maybe we should break this down into, like, 1, how do you decide, like, what to do a course on and like to like how do you then take that and break it down into rid Into the actual course.

Do you wanna tackle

that first, Scott? Yeah. Yeah. It's it's funny because a lot of my process for many of these things is very similar. So I'm constantly trying to capture, just capturing any any idea whatsoever.

So at any given point, I probably do have, like, 20 full Course ideas just kind of sitting there.

And I'll have them, you know, in an order of things I want to do versus things I don't want to do. And anytime, any interesting idea, whether it's product, like a a project that we're working on, or if it's a video specifically or an idea that I want to cover, What I do is I just add it to the list. I just add it to the list inside of the course. I keep all of these within Notion, and then I start to outline a course. And you really have to have that, like, where do you wanna start and where do you wanna get to in mind? Because otherwise, You could just be really focused. You could be, like, creating content into infinity.

So you need to kinda know what is where's the end here? And if you're doing a course on Building a website, a good start is the, you know, CLI building the thing or, like, creating the thing, and the good ending is deploying somewhere. So then you have to figure out in between creating and deploying, what are the things that I would like to hit? I wanna I wanna I want rid People to walk away with a good understanding of these following concepts. So for me, what I've been doing lately, at least, is all rid. You'll install stuff. You'll get the process. You'll get some bare bones understanding of this is this. This is there. Here's here's where the door is. Here's where the the window is. You know, just general layout stuff within the course. And then we'll maybe have, like, a a brief period where we're working on more of a rid. Smaller project based thing where we're using some of those skills that we've introduced in the previous few videos. But for me, it's it's understanding the goal, the end, the start, Beginning and then kind of picking out some key concepts to learn in there. And then you'll start to develop the ideas around those key concepts to the thing you're actually going to be building. Because sometimes I think, you know, people are a little bit focused on the end result of what the course is specifically and, like, Maybe not necessarily about the techniques. The friends you made along the way. The friends you made along the way. Right? So it's important to have Have the you know, what is the Lord of the Rings? More whatever the volcano or whatever they're trying to get to. Oh, don't ask me about Lord of the Rings. Dude, I don't know either. I'm not a Harry Potter fan.

So you you have this long journey. You're trying to get to the end of it, and you gotta say, okay, I'm gonna fly on some eagles here. I'm gonna, you know, get into a fight with a tree here or or whatever. These are the things I remember from Lord of the Rings. And and you need to know exactly where those things can fall within your your course parameters. Courses are big. I think one interesting you said there was, like, capturing. I think that's probably

a very probably a safe thing to say is step 0 for all the stuff that rid. And I do is capturing, and you have to be on it all the time because if you sit down and like, Scott and I have this problem sometimes. If we sit down and try to think of what a podcast idea is very hard. But As through the week, we come up with 3 or 4 ideas, and we capture them. We put them into our notion document. So I do the same thing with my course layouts or my courses as well is that as you are just going about your day, If you stumble upon something, make sure you write it down because you're for sure not going to remember that in the future. And I do that with my hot tips and blog posts and podcast ideas and courses, if you like. Oh, man, that would make an awesome piece of content for this medium. Make sure you write it down. I have it in. Rid. I usually put mine in markdown notes, or I'll just do it on my phone into a, into a notion document or something like that. And it's nice just to be able to put them somewhere so you don't lose them,

and then you can come back to it. I have a really fun thing that I maybe should tell you about that I I've been doing lately. So we we have this level up links newsletter list where I give, like, 5 5 hot things that I found over the week. Re and that was, like, key key capture, like, moment here. Right? Because anytime I stumble upon Any link that I think could be interesting for that LevelUp links, I need to capture it right away. And the last thing you wanna have to do is open up Some app that you don't have open, find the document, paste it in there, or whatever. So what I did, Wes, is I wrote a script for Raycast.

And so anytime that I want to add a link to the level up links, what I do is I just hit, You know, command, spacebar.

I type in link or just l because it auto completes it, and then I paste in the link. And then then it adds it to my my link list for later sorting, filtering, tagging, describing, or whatever.

And I could probably do the rid. Same thing for other modes of capture, like tutorial courses and stuff like that. But because I do need to capture, like, 5 links every single week, for me having that little ray cast rid Script that's available any any given second allows me to capture those really quickly. Genius. I like that a lot. That's good.

Rid. So I'll I'll go through my course one. What to do a course on? Ring.

I generally have a pretty good idea of where people are at, what they want. How do I figure out what they want? People ask me all the time, hey, are you gonna build a course on x, y, or z? Oh,

don't you just ask my email? X Zed Zed is wrong. That's one one part where Canada went wrong. Zed? I thought I you you you you go to Buffalo, and then you come back, rid.

There's there's sometimes we all say Zed.

I forget what it is, But, yeah, Z is rolls off the tongue much better. ZSH. That's where I say it. Yeah. I don't say ZSH, which makes sense. Rid Z shell.

So what to do? Course on whatever whatever it is that I have the interest rid. In doing and I know will sell well, and I generally have a pretty good idea, based on what people are asking for and and what I'm interested in. That that's another thing as well is that I certainly could do courses on whatever I wanted and I could sell them like crazy. Like, there's a reason why I don't have a NFT course or a blockchain course right now because I could probably get very rich off making a blockchain course right now, but rid. It's not of interest to me right now, at least. So it's not something I'm going to be doing a doing a course on. So that's that's the first one is we're figuring out what to do it on and then breaking down an actual course, a topic. Generally, what I'll do is if it's a specific technology or a specific back. I'll build 3 or 4 things in it, and then I will I'm also making a mind. I use mind mapping software, And I'll break the mind mapping software into all the major topics of a specific tech like TypeScript course. Right now, I break it all down into major, major high level topics.

And then each one of those, I'll break those down into subtopics. And then each one of those, I'll break those down into how I could teach you examples that we could have have for each.

And then once I'm once I'm I've got all that sort of surface area of what needs to be taught. I'll try to, like, bring it back and figure out, okay, what can we build, either as like a single app throughout the entire course or 20 different examples and many projects throughout the course.

What can we build that I make sure that I hit upon all those ideas. Like like Scott says, you got to you have a start and a finish. And then, like, what are the things that you need to teach along the way so that you make sure you hit upon the important stuff, the real world stuff rid, that people are going to be satisfied with that. So that's what I do is just build a whole bunch of stuff, keep lots of notes. And then once you have a nice, clear mind map of all the topics that need to be hit. Then I figure out how do I actually teach those in a fun and engaging way.

Yeah. Inside of our course. I tend to, like, even like, when I'm thinking about the content specifically, I tend to rid. More on the side of worrying about those big picture ideas than the final project itself because the final project is fine. Right? That that's something that is important that is Usable and good. But I'm more or less thinking about, like, when this person goes out into the real world to build Yeah. A site with re Remix, so to say. You're gonna need, what, like a contact form, maybe. Okay. So then we'll have to add something in there that allows you to send, maybe an email from a post request. Right? Like, what we do in our Remux course. It's like, what are the individual things that if somebody wasn't following your course And they were just trying to build something with this tech. What are the individual skills they would need ready to do any real world thing because it's really it may can make a course, like, really pointless if you're just,

showing off something that no one would ever need to actually do in a real course. Totally. You need to be able to show up. You have people how to validate stuff, how to update stuff, you know, all those bases that you need to hit. And then that's why, like, I always have ideas for 6 or 7 different projects we could build. Exactly. But at the end of the day, the project has to hit those actual real world things. Otherwise, it's like Scott says, not it's not going to be helpful to the person that's taking that course because they're going to They're going to start building their own thing and be like, Oh, wow, we didn't learn how to validate data or how to send the email. You know, like those are some core concepts. So I didn't learn that. Rid. Totally. So that's my course layout. That's kind of how I

tackle those things. Yeah, I do myself. So I know I did I said this, but I do, like, a a straight up outline.

Like, when I'm planning a course, I always have, like, a numbered list outline going of all of the videos at any given point that I can rearrange about that, and I can slide them around. And I can make sure that these core concepts are labeled very clearly. And then as I'm recording the course, Sometimes it will feel like I need more time on a topic, and then I can just update the list from there. So I I what I have is, like, a very fluid outline. It's a it's like a Just like you're if you were writing a term paper or something like that, you'd outline the whole thing, and then you kinda fill in the details.

But I'm not afraid to move large sections around or add additional sections while I'm recording if it feels like I need more than that. Yeah, I like that as well. I forgot to totally mention that as well as that. Rid. You take the

I'll make a layout of the actual videos that I want to make, and then every video will have points that need to hit gotchas, things like that, examples that need to be shown, and then they can be moved around or you can add a few. Like sometimes the topic will be 1 video, but I'm like, like I said, this is all this is a doozy. This needs to be broken into 2 or 3 different videos. Yeah.

Total doozy.

And that's that's really helpful because you kind of know where you are at throughout the entire thing. You've got some some guidance. Otherwise, you're just. Alright. What should we build next? Right? It's it's a little bit more structured to that. Yeah. Totally.

Oh, another thing too, when when I'm working on my, like, example code, You know, one thing I think we both both like to do is show, like, little mistakes here and there, but sometimes I I do like planned mistakes. Because If I'm writing the code myself for this course as the, like, the the test run of the code before I start recording anything, I will hit bugs along the way. And if I ever hit a bug along the way and have to run into some sort of a roadblock, what I do is I add that to my notes specifically And say, make sure to call out doing this will have this happen. You need to be aware of this because I like to think of myself as a normal developer, A normal person here who's going to hit some specific issues along the way. And if you can prevent people from hitting those issues by explaining something because you know you hit it or as weirded word in the rid Weirded word. It was worded weirdly in the documentation.

Then, of course, having that at the forefront of your brain while you're preparing that content is good rid to call out. That's really helpful for things that if you just tell someone to do them, they're not gonna understand why. Like,

rid. Okay. In React, you set state as a value of this input, and then you go and show them, okay, well, See, the state is in that input, but then try change it. And then it throws this error change from a controlled to non controlled and you get all this is like, okay, the reason why that happened is because We also didn't signify that there is an unchanged handler that goes along with it. Right? And somebody that's coming from another framework might be like, well, isn't it enough just to bind state to an input? Like, why are we doing these 2 things? And sometimes you can't just say, like, trust me, this is you got to do this.

It to show the actual error that you hit first before you get into why something. And that makes a lot more sense as to why you need to do something if you hit that actual error. That's a really good point. Yeah. Totally. Rid. Cool. You know what else is a good

point? What is a good point? On top of a rocket ship. One of our rid. Today is LogRocket at log rocket.com.

Now LogRocket is really evolved from a service that was just error rid. Handling with a video replay. It's more than just that now. It's also the place to really understand your users' behavior and, basically, how they're feeling about using your application because you can track user journeys.

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This is a service to understand how your users are using your site and really their their overall usage and whether that is through errors, you know, through bugs, whatever, or just in general rid through your site. So give it a try at logrocket.comforward/ syntax.

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Give it a try. Really, really neat service. All right. Let's move into

the next one, which is not something I do a whole lot anymore. It's kind of goes along with my YouTube videos where I'll just write a blog post when I have something that needs to be noted. Sometimes I write a quick I write a quick little tweet about something. I'm like, rid. This should really be a this should really be a blog post. But my general idea with blog posts is I'll hit upon something.

And this is generally something people ask me a lot about or something that I'll need to reference again in in the future.

So I will basically say, okay, I solved this problem. It was very tricky.

And this will be helpful to rid. Likely thousands of other developers who are going to hit this exact same same learning path. And I'm going to write the blog post that I found that. I wish I had found when I was having this issue.

And with that, it's generally pretty simple. I write the headings first, which is like, rid. Here's a problem that I hit.

Here is what I tried.

Or I'll put the tried lower than the actual solution so you don't people don't have to read through a whole story.

And then the breakdown of how you would actually fix it and then rid. Wrap it up with a little, a little finish and and a call to anyone who else had hit it, make sure they can update it. I put all my blog posts on GitHub so that, like, If someone else hits a problem and they found another way to fix it or they have a little clarification, then it's really nice for other people to add stuff to it. So, rid. Yeah. Just basically headlines similar to how you'd approach, like, like a paper in school where you you do your headlines, you do your major headlines, you do

Sub headlines in there, and then you just fill up the text and images as you go. Yeah. It really does feel like that is the process for a lot of this stuff where it's like Yeah. You capture the ideas when you have them. You outline when you can outline. You fill in the details, and then you release it. You know, my blog My blogging has been kind of interesting for me because I'm not a super skilled writer. So I'll tend to dictate most of my blog posts and just talk them out and then edit the dictation and then add in any sort of code examples that I need there. Just because it's easier for me to double tap the function key and speak into a mic, or is it the funky key? I don't know. Whatever key it is to double tap. Yeah. Double tap function key. Yeah. It turns on dictation, and then you can speak into the mic, have it record, whatever. And then I'll I'll edit that, turn it into an a real blog post. But, you know, my my blog posting strategy is kind of similar to yours, and I'm almost mostly blogging When I when I have an issue and an error and I Google it and nothing comes up because I know that other people are going to do that. They're gonna Google it. Nothing's gonna come up, and now they get a have issue or whatever. And you know who's gonna come up? My blog post because I hit it, and I'm sure other people hit it too. But I was the person who decided to make a blog post. You would not believe how many times I've googled something to have, you know, one of several blogs that I I followed before just always pop up with an answer, and that's Wes, yours included. There's so many times when I I Google something, and then Wes's blog post is, like, the first thing to pop up. And I'll be like, perfect. Alright. Got it. Yeah. So you just never know if you're hitting an error or something, the is it really that hard to take, you know, maybe an hour, You know, half an hour and just maybe do a little breakdown of what the bug was you hit, how you fixed it, what it ended up being, what's the process. And now there's That's out there. Right? And then you can build, SEO content. That way, you can build up a following. You can Sell courses. You could do any of that stuff once you have that sort of infrastructure in place, but it is just a little bit at a time whenever you need to think about something. It it is weird. When I plan blog posts, like, just like any of my other capture systems, I do have a capture system for blog post ideas. I, like, almost never do them. It's like it's usually like I'm sitting here. It'll be like a, you know, Friday, and I'll be like, I'm bored.

Oh, I'll just do a blog post on how to of a theme switcher and CSS. Okay, done.

Okay, that's up. Yeah. Another point about blog posts is blog posts are great Spot to reuse content.

So I have taken 2 of my paid courses, my ES6. Io and my beginner JavaScript, and I've had them.

I use technical writers.

There's there's people out there that are very good at technical writing, and they can take my my videos rid and turn them into actual written content and examples and code to code samples and all that stuff. And that's been very good for me because, like Scott says, often my stuff pops up. That's likely because a large portion of my blog, hundreds and hundreds of videos have been turned into Actual blog post videos, and that's really handy for quick reference and looking at it without having to watch an entire one. So sometimes I wonder if I could do that maybe a little bit more like this. This podcast that we do, we get the social things made. I'm not great about pushing those. Yeah, but sometimes I wonder, like, You make all this content like, wouldn't it be nice to double dip in some some regard where you are either releasing it in another format, video to text or chopping up little bite sized pieces and distribute them and other things. Sometimes you sometimes I see people. I'm like, All you're doing here is just reusing something, you know, and sometimes it doesn't feel good. But then other times I'm like, oh, that was a really good cut of

rid 2 minutes from a a 1 hour long podcast. I'd like to go watch the rest of that. Yeah. I'll actually share with with the audience a a blog post Caitlin, rid. Bloom had did for us. So Caitlin is our, marketing director, and she basically took a syntax episode that that you and I did. And it was I think it was the, like, the the tech That we're most interested in right now. Mine are, it's, like, not loading, so I can't pop it. The the, like, what's hot in 2022 syntax episode.

And and she just turned that into a blog post. And it says, in this episode of syntax, you know, Wes and Scott talk about this. You you can listen to it here, But here's, like, the key things. And so she would have it annotated. Here's Wes' picks. Here's Scott's picks. Whatever.

And it just made it into a nice blog rid. So we've been reusing content, but some people don't wanna listen to a whole podcast. They just maybe wanna get that that quick tech or whatever, that that quick little breakdown. So, Yeah. I'll share a link to that blog post in in the description once my Internet works better. I don't know what's going on right now. But yeah. It it again, blog posts are one of those things that It feels like there's no room in the blog pool. Right? But there's so much room in the blog pool. There's there's, like, a lot of room in the blog pool where you just start documenting whatever you're working on and breaking it down into chunks, whatever you can build a audience. And who knows? Maybe sell your blog to rid. Digital Ocean for a bunch of money. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, I think blogging is still super underrated

because. Yeah, I agree. Like like how do you find answers to literally anything? You Google it and like what shows up on Google blog posts. Right? Like you have video TikTok. All that stuff is is hot and that stuff can do very well for you.

But Again, where's a lot of Google searches is still generally indexing

just text. Yeah. Can you imagine searching for like, I I hit this error. I'm, like, search searching for the error, and then what pops up is, like, a TikTok video, and there's somebody, like, doing a dance and pointing at.

Rid. Yeah. That's not gonna work. You're you're gonna want a blog post for that kind of thing. Yeah. Speaking of blog posts, if you wanted to make a blog

or you wanted to make a website or whatever, and you need somewhere to store all of your content, whether that is obviously the text that goes along with it. Your titles, your authors, your all of your images, all that good stuff. But also you can do videos and form that you can you start it up.

You can clone some of the examples that they have, and you can define all of your content types right away. All right. I have a blog post. That blog post has a title, has a featured image, has an author. It has maybe a bunch of different blocks of content that go along in that blog post.

And then maybe I'll have another piece of content listed like a tag. And then maybe I'll have another a piece of content, which is, like, videos. And those videos can also be related to tags. Right? And they can have many authors.

You can expand this thing to do whatever you want. Right? So Sanity is an awesome CMS

that you can use,

to build out literally anything. A blog is probably a very, very simple example of that.

And I want you to check it out at sanity.

I0forward/syntax That will get you double the free usage tier.

Go to that URL. They have some they have a get started with their free plan. This is called the boosted free plan because you're a syntax listener.

You could build out your blog post. So thank you, Sanity, for sponsoring.

All right, let's go for the last one, which is like the podcast.

Rid. That's what people ask us all the time. Like, we are on show number 446 here, which is unbelievable,

to me. It feels like show number 2. It feels like we've just begun.

It's unreal. Like, if you were to ask me, like, what are the name 10 things you've talked about? I'd be like, react.

Svelte some CSS stuff. Like, I don't even know know if I could name 10 things. And For some reason, we are able to come up with 2 different shows every, every single week. And that's probably the hardest part for a lot of people.

I think it also is for us is figuring out what do you talk about every single week? And some weeks we have a list of 10, 15 things we want to talk about, and some weeks we don't have a whole lot. So it's good to have some sort of system in place to come up with ideas.

I think for us, we just have 2 huge lists in our notion. And every single time we come up with an idea, we throw a card on there. And sometimes those cards don't get touched rid For years, and sometimes they are recorded

that very same day. Yeah. Yeah. We have probably had some cards that have been in the syntax, like card, card system since who knows? Got it. Yeah. And that was actually one of the defining characteristics of when we even first talked about doing the podcast is that you and I, rid. Before we had even had a name for the podcast, we each were, like, writing down a ton of different potential episode ideas.

So we kind of had that system of capturing episode ideas in our brain, like, very early on in the process of creating a podcast. So, Again, look. I think the keyword of this entire episode is going to be the capture because capturing anything in that way, Anytime you have an idea for an episode, it pops into your brain. I put it in Notion. I put it in our list. And, again, we may not touch it. We may touch it. Who knows? Rid. We might open it this Christmas. We might open it next Christmas. You never have any idea. But I I personally love that system because there are some days where, like, you You have this really good idea. Maybe you write all the notes out for it, and then you wake up on Monday morning, and we're looking at them. Like, you know what? I really don't feel like talking about cookies today.

Rid. Yeah. I would prefer to talk about something a little bit more fun, like animations or something. And then it gives us that freedom and flexibility to, re Have a backup. Have something ready to go because the very worst thing you can do is to have 1 idea, one thing ready to go, And to not want to do it or to to feel, not excited or not passionate about it or whatever. Right? Because rid. The content's going to suffer because of it. Your audience is going to enjoy the content less, and you're kind of forcing yourself to do it. And you're gonna enjoy making it less. So I personally if as a just having lots of ideas to pull from at all times has been such a hack for me in creating content of any kind. Because as long as I have those ideas ready to go, I can find something that is going to be exciting for me to talk about at any given particular

time. Point. Just follow your energy. As long as you have lots of options, you can follow your energy into the one that you're going to do best when you're excited about one thing.

So in the podcast, we have it's it's pretty free form, but we do have a bit of a structure to it in that we have different kinds of shows. So we've got the potluck, which is once a month. We have listener questions, syntax highlight. We do once every couple of months. We review portfolios.

Rid. We have the fundamentals episodes where we dig into the basics of different technologies and and CSS and JavaScript and TypeScript and all that rid. Guests. We don't have a whole lot of guests. We're trying to figure out how to do that a little bit more efficiently. So it's a bit of a pain to schedule guests and get them on and come up with ideas. And And then also, like, we got tons of requests for people to come on. And a lot of those people we want to come on and then a lot of those people we don't want to come on. You know, like, just like rid. There's a lot to it. So we're trying to figure out a bit more of a better framework for doing guest because I personally, I think some of the best episodes we've had is when we just have rid. Some guests on, and you can talk about Kanye West or scheduling heavy industry with JavaScript. You know? Or Wordle.

Rid. Yeah, that one did really well. So there's those different kinds of shows, which is nice. We have a bit of a framework for that. And then there's also We have 2 different formats, such as the hasty and the tasty. The hasty is obviously a short one on Mondays.

Tasty is the long one on Wednesdays. And that's really nice because if we have a specific topic that we want to cover, but it's literally only 15, 20 minutes of us talking about it, it's nice to not have to lump that together with a couple other things or stretch it out for the sake of stretching it out as we could just we can just do a quick little Show on it, and there's no not a big deal for that. Yeah. I'm actually I'm really glad we did

break that in there because not every piece of content that you're making needs to have the same format. Right? That's, I think, a problem that you know, we're not talking about YouTube anymore, but I think YouTubers get into that. Would they were they're like, this has to be x, y, and z amount of length. Because if I don't optimize it for this specific length, then YouTube's not going to give me any money for the ads. Right? So then I'm gonna pad this thing with either time or bumpers, or I'm gonna make it extra rid of your content. I'm gonna make it off topic or whatever just to hit those time markers to pad the runtime of it for whatever reason. Or, You know, in blog posts, the same thing would just be like keyword stuffing where you're just adding paragraphs of not not nonsense Text, but unnecessary text that with the only intention of it, you know, increasing your SEO or something. So I I love that we planned in to have like, This episode is always going to be small, so do not pick big topics for this thing. You know?

Exactly.

And what's a funny thing? I was just thinking about all this stuff is I've never done anything in my career that is trying to please an algorithm. Yes. Which is becoming increasingly I think it's becoming increasingly difficult.

Yeah. For like like, I follow a bunch of, YouTubers, and they're like, oh, hell the algorithm. Make sure you hit the a button. Otherwise, I won't be able to post this stuff. You know, like, they're like, we have to play this game in order to satisfy it. But rid. Very lucky to have not having to fall down that hole yet, at least. I'm sure it will come at some point.

Podcasts are trying to trying to do that with Spotify.

YouTube, it's it's funny. It's like, with YouTube specifically, you know, the the amount of money that you can make via ad revenue is so much more if you just play their game. But, like, I'm not willing to do that.

Like, I my my shows are meant to be kind of rid. Short and digestible, whatever. We do 3 shows a week, and the intention of them is not to pad it with airtime to gain ad revenue. It's to, rid. Get a useful tip so that you'll walk away being like, oh, this was a useful tip. I'm going to subscribe to this channel now. You know? Yeah. I think that's it for

talking about all of our different types of content you can come up with. I think it's just some general themes there is just capture it, break it down and into mini headings and then fill those on out. That's a little different for every different medium that you have, but it's generally the same idea.

And I think it's worked well for both of us as content producers, professional content producers.

Yep. Professional content contenters.

Contenters.

Contenters.

Should we move on to the next section, which is some sick pics? Yes. If this is your 1st time listening to Syntax, this is the part of the show where we pick things that are sick, things that we really like. Sick as in good, not sick as in sick.

We we really like a lot of stuff because we're we're people of the Internet. So okay. Wes, I have a sick pick for t for you today that Is one of the things that I've been thinking about for a long time, and I just pulled the trigger on it, and it is a good buy. I bought a, $300, 2.99 under the desk treadmill.

And,

one of our our

One of my my coworkers at level up tutorials, he has had an under the desk treadmill for, like, 6 months, and I was asking about it. He said it's pretty good.

You know, it takes a little bit of getting used to and then whatever.

So I need to get some steps in. I need to get some movement going on in the day. I'm not exactly happy with the amount of calories I'm burning a day. So What I did is I found this one is a 2.99, which is on the cheap end of things for Amazon for Amazon under the desk treadmills, maybe even, like, the cheapest.

And get this, it was on sale. It was an extra, like, $20 off because I got the yellow one. They were, like, I I would have taken the yellow one, but they're like, no. Nobody wants this yellow one, so the yellow one is going to be cheaper. So I I got lucky, and I got a yellow treadmill, Gotta love that. Either way, this That's awesome. This thing is is pretty neat because it's compact enough where Fits underneath my desk. It's on a little roller. I pulled it underneath. I do the standing desk thing, and then I hit go, and I start walking. And now I'll walk for about an hour and a half each day now while I'm coding. And I've been doing this now for I wanna say it arrived on Monday of last week, so I've done it now for 4 workdays. So not that much, but not little bit. And what's interesting about having an under the desk treadmill is that after about 10 minutes of walking on it, you forget that you're walking on a treadmill. And I'm not walking super fast. I end up walking, like, couple miles a day now while I'm working, while I'm coding. And if you schedule it around certain tasks like Answering email, I could spend an hour answering email a day. And if I'm gonna be doing that, might as well walk on a treadmill. It's really not that tough. So It has been really neat. You know, I've I've burned, like, 400 calories just while answering email, which is ridiculous.

But It's been very nice. And and, you know, I think some people, like, hear this, and they said there's no way I could possibly type and walk on a treadmill.

And I thought the same thing. Surprisingly,

Not that difficult. I'm actually pretty shocked at at how how little you notice it once you've been doing it for a minute or two. That's really cool. My wife was asking me about that the other day. She's like, look at these treadmills. They they go under your desk. It'd be kinda neat to have 1. I thought, yeah, man. Like, rid. I I think that would be pretty cool to have. I I'm very tempted to try the standing desk that goes up and down. You know? Like, I might be redoing my my office in the next couple months, so I don't know if that's worth getting to hook up on the parts list. I mean,

rid. From from my desk, you can buy the legs separately. So if you have a piece of wood for a desk like I do, that's fine and ends up saving you a little bit of money. But, Yeah. My setup is so good. Courtney had me do the same thing, and and she actually just ordered her own treadmill. So now we literally will have 2 under the desk treadmills in our house Because we both have the same desk because I built her desk for her. So her is amazing this week, and she's pretty psyched about it. So yeah.

Sweet. I'm going to pick another hot sauce.

We went to Buffalo this weekend, me and my wife, which is the 1st time we've been back to the states rid.

In well over 2 years, and we the first thing you do when Canadians do when you go to the States is you go to Target.

Rid. And then the last thing you do before you come back is you go to Trader Joe's.

So we do not have either of those. Do you have a good teacher? Oh, no. Rid. No way. It's it's like the best thing ever when we go.

And, like, I've had most of the hot sauces at Trader Joe's and, like, the, rid what's the big the green dragon one everybody loves? I've I've been drinking that stuff for years, but I just got this new one, which is, rid. I don't know if it's new or not. It's the 1st time I've ever had it. It's a Trader Joe's yuzu hot sauce.

It says simultaneously spicy

And citrusy fragrant. And here, I'll show you a picture of it. We got some in the house. We got some in that. Really? Man, it's awesome. So I,

I was like, this is very Acidic. Yep. So I was like, this is this is going to go super well on like, I had some, like, a black bean and roasted pork dish. Mhmm. And I put that with some rice. Put that on top of it. Bam. Exactly what you want on a a very, like, base tasting dish. Just a little bit of a pow pow, you know? Pow pow. So I'm gonna tell you, If you got a TJ's or if you're Canadian, they're opening up the border. Now you can go down to Trader Joe's, get the Trader Joe's Yuzu hot sauce. I've been

Very, very happy with it. There's like some sort of contract that I have with reality where if I'm at a store and there's something that contains Yuzu, And it's like this in yuzu, yuzu in anything. I'm, like, buying it. Who cares? Figure it out later. What is this? I don't even know what a yuzu is. Is that a citrus fruit? Yes. It's rid. Kind of like a lemon. It's like a Japanese lemon kind of.

Yeah. I know. Yuzu, one of my favorite flavors. Yuzu. You too.

Rid. Shameless plugs. I'll shamelessly plug all my courses. Westboss.comforward/courses.

You can learn rid. Beginner JavaScript, Master Gatsby, full stack advanced React and GraphQL, JavaScript 30, React for beginners, dozens of other not dozens. Rid. There's several others on that list. Check out see if anything piques your interest. A bunch of them are free. A bunch of them are paid. If it's a paid one, make sure you use a coupon code syntax. You get $10 off.

You can also check out level up tutorials, and level up tutorials is a place where we release a new tutorial rid. Series every single month. And the latest one is going to be on super bass and remix, with John Myers from Super base. So it's going to be really, really cool. He's building a real time chat app in Remix with authentication, rid in real time with super bass how how cool is that so check it out level up tutorials at .com if you sign up to become a pro you can actually, we have a little I have a little coupon here. So if you've listened this far, if you wanna use the coupon code syntax, You can get an additional 30% off of that yearly subscription, so making it a very good price. So check it out, level up tutorials.com.

Alright. That's it. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. We'll catch you on Monday.

Peace.

Peace.

Head on over to syntax.fm for a Full archive of all of our shows.

And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player or drop a review if you like this show.

Rid.